With the development of mobile internet services, as well as the integration of many types of mobile access networks, a gateway device needs to develop gradually toward a more refined service control and charging function on the basis of completing the basic data forwarding function, thereby supporting richer service implementation and control of the operators.
Currently, under the existing control and forwarding decoupling architecture, the gateway device is divided into two parts, which are respectively called a control layer device and a forwarding layer device. The control layer device processes signaling with external devices, such as the signaling with the authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) server, the signaling with the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) and so on. After completing the signaling negotiation, the control layer device sends signaling or information to be forwarded by the forwarding layer device to the forwarding layer device, the forwarding layer device forwards the signaling or information to be forwarded to the external devices. Therefore, the current control layer device is responsible for processing the signaling, the forwarding layer device is responsible for forwarding the corresponding signaling or information.
It is defined in the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Tunneling Protocol (GTP) that the control layer device identifies the state of an opposite-end device and whether the corresponding transmission link fails, and performs corresponding process to the failed path and the opposite-end device reset, the forwarding layer device only needs to transparently transmit the corresponding signaling or information of path management mechanism in two directions, therefore, the deficiencies in the prior art are that:
Since the control layer device generally needs to be interconnected with a large number of base stations, base station controllers and other gateway devices, and each external device may also adopt multiple Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and thus a huge number of path states and the states of the corresponding opposite-end devices needs to be identified, the control layer device also needs to transparently transmit a lot of information through the forwarding layer device, thus significant signaling load is caused on the interface between the control layer device and the forwarding plane device, moreover, when the interface between the control layer device and the forwarding plane device fails, misjudgment of the path state by the control layer device will be caused, and meanwhile misjudgment of the state of the opposite-end device corresponding to the path will also be caused.